Fluid Flow & Aerodynamics
why things fly, and why the usual explanation is wrong
Concept

Mixing length — where it appears

Prandtl's assumption that a turbulent eddy carries momentum over a distance proportional to its distance from the wall. It is one line, it implies the whole structure of a wall profile, and it is a hypothesis rather than a consequence of anything.

Named by 4 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

u⁺ = (1/κ) ln y⁺ + B, integrated rather than asserted. The velocity profile in wall units, produced by integrating the mixing-length closure outward from the wall. The straight portion is the log law and the constants beside it were least-squares fitted to the integrated curve over 50 < y⁺ < 500 — so the 1/κ is a measurement on the drawing rather than the number that was fed in. The viscous sublayer u⁺ = y⁺ comes out rather than being pasted on.

A guess with a constant in it

Prandtl's mixing length is one line — an eddy near a wall can only be as big as its distance from the wall. Integrate it and the whole structure of a turbulent wall profile falls out, sublayer and log region and all. That is a fact about the assumption, and the essay is careful about which.

turbulence · Closure The plateau that is the log law. y⁺ du⁺/dy⁺ across a channel, at five Reynolds numbers. Millikan's argument says this quantity must be constant wherever neither the viscous length nor the channel width may appear, and its value there is 1/κ. At Re_τ = 180 there is no flat part at all; at Re_τ = 100,000 it is flat over 2.16 decades and gives κ = 0.4120. The log law is a statement about a limit, and this is the picture of the flow approaching it.

The layer with no length in it

The logarithm in a turbulent wall profile does not come from any model of turbulence. It comes from a region where neither of the flow's two lengths is allowed to appear, and where a velocity gradient therefore has nothing to depend on but the distance to the wall. The constant in it has never been derived from anything.

turbulence · Wall law Four wall models, through the buffer layer. Van Driest's damped mixing length, Reichardt's fit, Spalding's implicit law, and a control with no buffer layer at all — the viscous sublayer joined straight to the logarithm where they cross, at y+ = 11.6. The three fitted models agree with each other to a per cent and a half; the control is nineteen per cent above them at y+ = 10.

Three buffer layers, one friction

Four wall models are put through a pipe. The one with no buffer layer at all is nineteen per cent wrong where the turbulence production peaks and two and a half per cent wrong in the friction; the three respectable ones are within two per cent of each other in the buffer layer and spread by seven in the friction. The answer is not where it was expected.

turbulence · Wall law Where the eddies outconduct the molecules. The ratio of turbulent to molecular heat diffusivity across the pipe at Reτ = 2000, for five fluids, on logarithmic axes. Wherever it is above one the eddies carry more heat than conduction does. For air it passes one inside the buffer layer and reaches 135; for water, earlier and higher. For liquid sodium it never reaches one anywhere: at its peak, halfway to the axis, the eddies carry just over half what conduction carries, and the temperature profile is set by conduction across the whole pipe.

The heat the eddies do not carry

In a laminar layer the temperature and the velocity have different thicknesses in every fluid but one. In a turbulent pipe the eddies carry both, and the difference nearly vanishes — for air, water and oil alike. It does not vanish for a liquid metal, whose molecules conduct heat faster than the eddies can, and the boundary between the two behaviours is a Péclet number of about four hundred at every Reynolds number.

regimes · Peclet

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Eddy viscosityThe law of the wallThe von Kármán constantWall unitsBoundary layerClosureFriction velocityOverlap layerTurbulenceViscous sublayerClosure problemConstraint

All concepts